An infant that is born in a hospital setting typically leaves the hospital after a short stay in a maternity ward. However, if the infant is born prematurely or with health difficulties, the infant may need to be kept in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for an extended amount of time. In such a situation, the mother is often unable to breast feed the infant herself because of the need to carefully monitor the amount of milk that is fed to the infant.
Traditionally, an infant kept in the NICU is fed using breast milk that has been provided by the mother to the NICU. More particularly, the mother expresses breast milk into a container and provides the container to the NICU. A nurse within the NICU subsequently carries the container to the child, fills a measuring device with a measured amount of the breast milk from the container, and attaches the measuring device to the child's feeding tube.
However, this system is purely visual and prone to error in an environment of high activity and stress, such as a NICU. A typical NICU includes multiple infants, and is characterized by the continuous ingress and egress of nurses, technicians, doctors, and mothers. In this environment it is easy for a nurse to inadvertently feed the breast milk to the wrong child.
Systems have been proposed to assist in the monitoring the temperature of expressed breast milk. For example, U.S. Patent Publication No. 2008/0087726 describes a system that utilizes radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in conjunction with a neonatal substrate warming and cooling unit to monitor the temperature of breast milk from the time the breast milk is received by the NICU until it is fed to the infant. The temperature monitoring provided by this system utilizes the RFID tags that can be read when the container is located within a warming oven or refrigeration unit.